Just a joke. Psychogenesis of humor in alcohol advertisements

This article asks what psychic functions humorous alcohol advertisements employ and how they are connected to the wider cultural meanings of alcohol. The material comprises 27 advertisements televised in Europe in 2013. The material is primarily examined using Freud’s ideas regarding the psychogenesis of jokes. Freud’s conceptions of humor provide in-depth point of views to understand how the advertisements address the viewer’s mind. We recognized three psychic processes: the pleasure of nonsense, recognition of the familiar, and liquidation of criticism. We argue that these are essential psychic activities which characterize the more or less unconscious functioning and content of humorous alcohol advertisements. The article suggests that the humorous strategies recall the infantile pleasure connected to playing with language. The humor in alcohol advertisements may also liquidate the critical attitudes toward drinking, enforce the process of denial of addiction and prohibit the reality-based reflection of alcohol use.     

Grant Me the Knowledge of What I Want Because All I Know Is That I Want: A Lacanian View of Hysteria

ABSTRACT

Freud’s work with hysterics led him to the discovery of the unconscious and the founding of psychoanalysis. The dream of the beautiful butcher’s wife, one of Freud’s patients, is examined following Lacan’s added insights that give full credit to his well known statement: “The unconscious is structured like a language.” Three basic identifications are presented by Lacanian analysis and I add a clinical vignette that exemplifies my work in the treatment of a couple.     

Unconscious Communication in the Intersubjective Analytic Field at Times of Separation,Loss, and Termination

ABSTRACT

Unconscious communication, like transference-countertransference, is ubiquitous in life and in the psychoanalytic process. Regardless of a clinician’s theoretical perspective, and despite differences in clinical technique, Freud’s advice to turn our unconscious to the patient’s unconscious “like a receptive organ” has guided generations of analysts toward deeper exploration of the countertransference in the intersubjective analytic field (Freud, 1912a, p. 115). In this clinical article, the recognition and use of unconscious communication, from the ordinary to the more extraordinary or uncanny, is described at moments of separation as harbinger of loss and, ultimately, termination. Such moments hold potential for a depth of emotional resonance with and accessibility to our patient’s psychic realities that may otherwise be unavailable due to our systemic defense against a shared existential anxiety that all things come to an end. The emergence of unconscious communication via the analyst’s reverie and dreams are considered an opening of potential space where ending can be conceived as a bearable thought—a transitional organizing experience for the dyad.     

Freud and the Psychoanalysis of Telepathy: Commentary on Claudie Massicotte’s “Psychical Transmissions”

Freud was interested in and eventually accepted the diverse forms of telepathic communication as psychoanalytic rather than occult phenomena, particularly as manifested in dreams. Massicotte revisits the topic of Freud and his interest in the occult in a manner that invites serious reconsideration of this aspect of his work, long the subject of intense controversy in the history of psychoanalysis. In my response to Massicotte’s paper I argue that Freud’s interest in telepathy or thought transference belongs to his psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and transference. His approach to telepathy parallels his approach to religious beliefs: He accounts for both as creations of the human mind as individuals attempt to make sense and meaning of their real experiences. What Freud meant by telepathy is what contemporary psychoanalysis refers to as unconscious communication, and the strange, often inexplicable forms it takes in clinical contexts. For Freud, instances of telepathy or unconscious communication are to be understood contextually and relationally, revealing important data about the nature of affectively charged human relationships.     

Who Dares,Speaks: Critical psychotherapy and the poetics of suffering

It is proposed that a critical psychotherapy could be developed by combining ideas from psychoanalysis with concepts from poetics, as Lacan originally suggested. Taking a narrative and personal style, and using examples of two men silenced by trauma and a clinical vignette, the author combines Laplanche’s psychoanalytic concept of fourvoiement with some examples of the poetics of ambiguity as an example of how such a critical psychotherapy could develop. Studying how words express more than their literal meaning is combined with the idea that we are continually going astray from the original decentring concept of the unconscious that Freud introduced to psychotherapy.     

The Evolutionary Significance of the Primary Process—The Freudian Concept and Its Revision

Freud’s Lamarckian beliefs contributed to his theory of instincts, as well as his concepts regarding the unconscious primary process. Freud’s theory of the primary and secondary process is fundamentally biological, as he placed it within an evolutionary context and hypothesized that the two systems were distinguished by free and bound psychic energy. Freud’s distinction between the primary and secondary process is one of the few psychoanalytic theories that has been confirmed by science. We believe that Freud was correct in maintaining that the primary process is of earlier evolutionary origin than the secondary process. But Freud failed to recognize the distinction between primary-process thinking that occurs in dreams and that which occurs in the waking state. In the waking state, the primary process is not wish fulfilling, as Freud believed, but functions as an inference making tool utilizing metaphor and metonymy. As such, rapid, unconscious primary process thinking is at the heart of our survival.     

From Freud’s dream-work to Bion’s work of dreaming: The changing conception of dreaming in psychoanalytic theory

Bion moved psychoanalytic theory from Freud's theory of dream-work to a concept of dreaming in which dreaming is the central aspect of all emotional functioning. In this paper, I first review historical, theoretical, and clinical aspects of dreaming as seen by Freud and Bion. I then propose two interconnected ideas that I believe reflect Bion’s split from Freud regarding the understanding of dreaming. Bion believed that all dreams are psychological works in progress and at one point suggested that all dreams contain elements that are akin to visual hallucinations. I explore and elaborate Bion’s ideas that all dreams contain aspects of emotional experience that are too disturbing to be dreamt, and that, in analysis, the patient brings a dream with the hope of receiving the analyst’s help in completing the unconscious work that was entirely or partially too disturbing for the patient to dream on his own. Freud views dreams as mental phenomena with which to understand how the mind functions, but believes that dreams are solely the ‘guardians of sleep,’ and not, in themselves, vehicles for unconscious psychological work and growth until they are interpreted by the analyst. Bion extends Freud's ideas, but also departs from Freud and re-conceives of dreaming as synonymous with unconscious emotional thinking – a process that continues both while we are awake and while we are asleep. From another somewhat puzzling perspective, he views dreams solely as manifestations of what the dreamer is unable to think.     

WITHSTANDING TRAUMA: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF EMMA ECKSTEIN'S CIRCUMCISION TO FREUD'S IRMA DREAM

The author considers the medical rationale for Wilhelm Fliess's operation on Emma Eckstein's nose in February 1895 and interprets the possible role that this played in Freud's dream of Irma's injection five months later. The author's main argument is that Emma likely endured female castration as a child and that she therefore experienced the surgery to her nose in 1895 as a retraumatization of her childhood trauma. The author further argues that Freud's unconscious identification with Emma, which broke through in his dream of Irma's injection with resistances and apotropaic defenses, served to accentuate his own “masculine protest”. The understanding brought to light by the present interpretation of Freud's Irma dream, when coupled with our previous knowledge of Freud, allows us to better grasp the unconscious logic and origins of psychoanalysis itself. 1     

Drives and objects - notes on the change of drive theory

Freud’s drive theory has been questioned since the 1940s when Fairbairn created a metaphor of the mind that is not based on the tripartite model and drive theory. His work inspired others to elaborate on the significance of internal object relationships. According to the object relation theory, internal object relations are dynamic structures capable of generating meanings and action. Consequently, two distinct metapsychologies were created.The aim of this article is to show how the interaction of theories has initiated revisions of classic drive theory. Freud’s concept of drive and three synthesizing viewpoints between the two perspectives are discussed. Otto Kernberg addresses affects as a primary motivational system; the mother–infant relationship organizes affects to drives. Joseph Sandler adheres to classic drive theory but proposes that the ego’s attempt to protect the mind against psychic pain is as important as drive derivatives in motivating the mind. Laplanche proposes that the unconscious of the care-giving adult is the crucial factor for the constitution of an infant’s unconscious and drives. For Freud and Klein, drive is inherent. Contemporary writers, like Loewald and Laplanche, conceive drive as a function of the mind that is born out of the same matrix of interaction with the other elements of the mind.     

The presence of Spinoza in the exchanges between Sigmund Freud and Romain Rolland1

Although Freud recognized his profound affinity with Spinoza, we seldom find explicit and direct references to the philosopher in his works. The correspondence between Romain Rolland, the ‘Christian without a church’, and Freud, the ‘atheist Jew’, is full of Spinozian reminiscences that nourish their works of this period and are underpinned by their mutual transference. The Future of an Illusion is written according to a Spinozian blueprint and aims at replacing religion, qualified as superstition, by psychoanalysis. A quotation from Heine, ‘brother in unbelief’, is a direct reference to Spinoza. Concurring with Freud’s critiques of dogmas and churches, Rolland proposes an analysis of the ‘oceanic feeling’ as a basis of the religious sentiment. Freud replies with Civilization and Its Discontents. In 1936, on the occasion of Rolland’s 70th birthday, Freud sends him an open letter, A disturbance of memory on the Acropolis, where the strange feeling that he has experienced in front of the Parthenon refers inter alia to his double culture: Jewish and German. In the light of this correspondence, the creation of psychoanalysis turns out to be a quest for the sacred that has disappeared in modernity; Freud, though, was able to find it inside man’s unconscious.     

Freud’s Three Theories of Neurosis: Towards a Contemporary Theory of Trauma and Defense

This paper explores the development of Freud’s thinking on the aetiology of the neurosis. It is shown that Freud in the years 1893 to 1897 formulated three distinct and mutually incompatible theories of neurosis centred respectively on (a) psychic trauma and defence, (b) sexual trauma (seduction), and (c) repressed sexuality (libido). For Freud the decisive step was the shift from the first to the second theory, not from the second to the third. It is examined how Freud gave priority to the libido/fantasy theory until he returned in 1926 to a general trauma theory with his second theory of anxiety. The fate of Freud’s theory of neurosis in later psychoanalytic thinking is described as a process of dilution rather than an exploration of what is right and what is wrong in the theory. It is argued that the basic fault common to Freud’s second and third theories is the insistence on an exclusive sexual aetiology of the neurosis. On the other hand, it is argued that Freud’s first theory, centred on emotional trauma and defence, has turned out to be basically right and is therefore well suited to constitute a basis for a contemporary theory of neurosis (non-neurological mental disorders).     

Abwehr, Verdrängung und Ersatzbildung

The author investigates the relationship of defence, repression and substitutive formation as it presents itself in Freud’s writings. He shows that Freud gives at least four different meanings to the term “repression”: Freud uses it interchangeably with defence, as a consciously intended forgetting, as a specific unconscious mechanism of defence and to describe the consequence of defence mechanisms leading to substitutive formations. The inconsistencies in this relationship are discussed and clarified and Freud’s economic and linguistic attempts to justify repression are subjected to critique as well as the need of a primal repression as a necessary condition for repression proper. In developing Freud’s linguistic justification of repression further, the author presents defence as a semantic displacement. Ideas are excluded from the realm of the concepts which belong to them historically. These presentations become unconscious, i.e. repressed, in that they can no longer be identified as “cases” of these conceptual internal contents. At the same time they are displaced into the extensions of concepts whose internal contents do not belong to them originally. It is by virtue of the internal contents of these concepts that the displaced elements as substitutive formations once again attain consciousness, albeit a false one. It is suggested that repression as a specific defence mechanism of its own should be dismissed, to reverse Freud’s thesis that repression as a rule creates a substitutive formation into its opposite and to understand that the mechanisms used to build substitutes as a rule create repression.     

The mind beyond our immediate awareness: Freudian, Jungian, and cognitive models of the unconscious

Abstract: Several branches of cognitive science now focus on the nature of the unconscious. This paper explores some of the findings and models from this research. By introducing formulations based on non‐clinical data, the cognitive scientists—in neural linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroscience—may depart from the older psychoanalytic formulations. An understanding of unconscious neural processes is nevertheless emerging showing how synapses are modified by experience and how learning, conscious and unconscious, is due to this important aspect of brain plasticity. Freud and Jung's formulations about the unconscious psyche, representing the main tenets of depth psychology, are also based on a conception of the mind as extending beyond immediate awareness. However, their models are more hypothetical in that their data, almost exclusively, come from treatments of psychotherapy patients and their verbal accounts. So how do these two conceptions of the unconscious match, where do they differ? And how does the neural understanding in the present research support theories and practices of analytic treatments?     

Elasticity and Healing: A Moment of Renewal

The simultaneous celebration of the donation by Dr. Judith Dupont of the Ferenczi Archive to the London Freud Museum and of the launch of two new books on Ferenczi in the Karnac History of Psychoanalysis Series provides an occasion for reflection on the trauma inflicted on the psychoanalytic world by the Freud–Ferenczi rift and on the hope for renewal symbolized by Dr. Dupont’s gift. Tribute is paid to Judith Dupont and to André Haynal for their contributions to preserving Ferenczi’s legacy. It is argued that Freud bears responsibility for pathologizing those with whom he had intellectual disagreements, but that Ferenczi’s concept of elasticity points the way to a reconciliation of Freud and Ferenczi that renders it no longer necessary to “rescue psychoanalysis from Freud.”     

Unconscious phantasy as a structural principle and organizer of mental life: The evolution of a concept from Freud to Klein and some of her successors

Starting with Freud's discovery of unconscious phantasy as a means of accessing his patients’ internal world, the author discusses the evolution of the concept in the work of Melanie Klein and some of her successors. Whereas Freud sees phantasy as a wish fulfilling imagination, dominated by primary process functioning and kept apart from reality testing, Klein understands phantasies as a structural function and organizer of mental life. From their very beginnings they involve object relations and gradually evolve from primitive body‐near experiences to images and symbolic representations. With her concept of projective identification in particular, Klein anticipates the communicative function of unconscious phantasies. They are at the basis of processes of symbolization, but may also be put into the service of complex defensive operations. The author traces the further evolution of the concept from the contributions of S. Isaacs, the theories of thinking proposed by W.R. Bion and R. Money‐Kyrle, Hanna Segal's ideas on symbolization and reparation all the way to the latest approaches by R. Britton, J. Steiner and others, including the understanding of transference and counter‐transference as a ‘total situation’. Points of contact with Freud are to be found particularly in connection with his concept of ‘primal phantasies’. In the author's view, the idea of the transmission and communicative potential of unconscious phantasies enabled these authors to overcome the solipsistic origins of drive theory in favour of a notion in which unconscious phantasies both set down the coordinates of the inner world and form and reflect the matrix of inter‐subjective relations.     

The screen function of unconscious fantasy

Although being a fundamental concept in psychoanalysis, fantasy is an ambiguous term. It covers a vast field of conscious and unconscious phenomena, from daydreaming, the manifest narration of the patient’s world of imagination to unconscious fantasy and primal fantasy. Further, it introduces the delicate alternatives of imaginary versus real, subject versus object and internal versus external. Following Freud’s reflections on the ambiguity of fantasy, we arrive at an idea introduced by Freud himself, but elaborated years later by Lacan. Fantasy, accordingly, is seen as a screen which both reveals and conceals. Our aim is to demonstrate, theoretical as well as clinical, how unconscious fantasy serves as a window into not only repressed wishes and conflicts, but also the most primary scenes where the subject may not even have a specific place. Simultaneously, it is the site of protection and defence, including projection and denial, but also repetition of what we will call the identical. A clinical case will be presented to illustrate our theoretical ideas and their clinical implications.     

Freud and the figure of Moses: the Moses of Freud.

Moses was a lifelong preoccupation of Freud, representing a double and idealized self and object. Freud identified with different aspects of Moses during different periods of development, from concrete hero to abstract ideal. He turned to Moses in the concluding phase of his relationship with Fliess and his self-analysis, and then at other times of crisis. The Moses recreated by Freud is important to the evolution of the concepts of the superego, and his Moses studies simultaneously illuminate the developmental significance of internalization, identification, and abstract symbolic thought. Latently autobiographical, the Moses motif is related to the analysis of unconscious conflict and trauma and to issues of Jewish identity and analytic ideals.     

‘Translation’ and ‘transformation’ in the analytic situation: Freud – Bion – Laplanche

Following a short introduction to the core theses of Jean Laplanche’s theory of a ‘general seduction’ the author presents the resultant clinical position of the analyst. In the same way that an adult sends ‘enigmatic messages’ to the child, it is the analyst’s task to reopen this primal situation so that the patient can find new ‘translations’ for these messages. Laplanche distinguishes between the function of the analytic frame – which represents and supports attachment – and the ‘sexual’– which is the repressed and constitutes the unconscious. Only the focus on this unconscious facilitates the deconstruction of ‘incorrect’ translations. Accordingly, the analyst, says Laplanche, should not take part in construction – this is a self‐construction of the patient – but only in reconstruction. The author compares this clinical model with Freud’s notions and the ‘transformation processes’ through the alpha function as described by Bion. She illustrates Laplanche’s model and the interpretation strategy with case material.